All Forum Posts by: Taylor E.

Land Trusts (and all trusts in general) has a Trustee and a Beneficiary. The Beneficiary is the one who benefits from the trust, but the Trustee is the only who controls it. The Trustee is also most likely the one who signed the deed when the property was purchased. If you have a good relationship with an investor-friendly title company, you could try asking them to trace the title history if the county clerk/assessor doesn't have a system in place for you to do it yourself. The key takeaway is: you want the Trustee. 

As far as wholesaling it, it's no different than wholesaling an LLC-owned or individual-owned property. The Trust will sell the asset to you via the Trustee (the Trustee is the one who signs off on the docs). If the land trust only holds the one property you're interested in, you could also offer to purchase the trust itself, particularly the beneficial interest in the trust (purchase the Beneficiary spot), contingent on the fact the Trustee resigns as Trustee. 

Of course, see a good asset protection/real estate lawyer about this just to make sure.

Sacramento? I travel there quite often to visit friends. I'm naturally drawn to this post haha. From my experience (especially when browsing a competitive market like anything in California), the deals are usually discovered by (1) word of mouth and (2) going where no one else is willing to go. The "trenches" of your market. Sacramento is one of those mid-size cities that doesn't seem to have any seriously blighted areas and the few blighted properties are few and far in between. It's a very safe market and that's probably why everything is getting snatched up. 

I would suggest probates, liens, bankruptcies, and class B/C/D landlords with vacancies (see if you can find some migration data). A lot of people are moving out of California because of the pandemic, lack of economic support, and high taxes/cost of living. 

Good luck! Looking forward to hear about your success!

I may be biased because most of my hobbies are in computer science and surrounding topics, but the value people see in Bitcoin (BTC) is (almost) completely derivative of the devaluation of fiat currency. 

Why is the value so high? For those that are curious, don't understand, or simply like reading: BTC has a set amount (21 million) to be "mined" or pocketed. The anonymous creator is rumored to have a stash, but regardless, publicly, there will only be 21 million Bitcoin. 

Fiat money (obviously) is not a finite resource. Despite the FDIC insurance one may get from a bank, the government will continually print more money whenever they need to. Just like when a company does a stock split and increases the number of shares, the value of the individual share decreases, so does the US dollar. Except when the money printer prints, the holders of "previous" dollars are not given more money to make up for the loss of purchasing power. Since the Federal Reserve took over the banking system in 1913, the purchasing power of $1 has decreased. Needless to say, people are tired of this.

There is no BTC printer. BTC is much like gold or some other precious metal where the scarcity is significant. BTC (unless a BTC printer system emerges) will most likely be perpetually inflationary because of this, regardless of temporary dips.

Why did Bitcoin jump up so high recently? To make the long story short: major players poured major amounts of money into it. Particularly, highly conservative industries like insurance companies just poured large amounts of money into BTC. Here's some articles that detail the investments much better than I could:

• One of the Largest Macro Hedge Funds Quietly Invests in Bitcoin
• Insurance Giant MassMutual Buys $100 Million of Bitcoin
• Northern Trust Aids Hedge Funds in Cryptocurrency Investment

Additionally, multiple interviews (take them as you will) from major players with plenty of experience have predicted that BTC will increase up to $400k or $500k, and they put money where their mouth is. The most popular one is Guggenheim's Scott Minerd's interview with Bloomberg. 

Is Bitcoin a viable asset right now? Well that depends on how you want to use it. If you expect to use BTC to buy your groceries and pay your bills in 2020, you will not see BTC as a viable asset. BTC is an inflationary asset with high verifiability, fungibility, portability and divisibility. The best use for this (right now) is as a store of value. Considering the last 100+ years of the US Dollar's pitiful performance in maintaining it's power, an idle a cash emergency fund, savings account, uninvested retirement fund is incredibility unwise. Your money may be insured, it may be accepted as a form of payment by Walmart, but it won't do anything. It won't fight the rising prices of goods, and will certainly not bring returns. BTC can solve (and is solving) this problem. And it's solving this problem better than other stores of value.

In the 90s and 00s, people saw the concept of sending electronic messages and mail as a hilarious futuristic fantasy. Regulations and rules will come, but that happens with everything. I would not miss out on very real historical returns and suffer very real losses over possible temporary losses due to regulation. The market in general, has always rebounded and experienced a net increase from a loss, even in little time. We can't say that about cash.

And as far as your cheeky question: Can we really say a new car is worth 1 BTC? Yes, we can. Just like we can say a new house is worth $100,000, and we understand that dollar amounts are divisible and the dollar itself is a unit of measurement, we can now say a new car is worth 1 BTC, and that BTC amounts are divisible and the BTC itself is a unit of measurement.

Why are there losers? The same way there are losers in long-term investing, short-term investing, day trading, and more. Skills. I would not put all my money in BTC just like I wouldn't hold all my wealth in cash, invest in only one stock, or have a portfolio of just rentals, flips, etc. You must diversify. The same goes for BTC and that's where I've seen the most trouble. 

Second, there is only a finite amount of BTC. So there's going to be hoarders. A lot of people have romanticized BTC as "the People's currency" simply because it's decentralized and censorship resistant. So they pour their energy, time, and resources into techniques advertised by gurus like mining and Coinbase signups and think they'll be set. This is not correct. BTC will not solve the wealth gap. Those with more wealth and resources will collect and hold the most BTC, and once it's all mined, the biggest hoarders will hold the keys on just how much BTC is flowing between everyone else just like now with money. And this will happen even faster with BTC because halving.

I personally keep about 5-10% of my net worth in BTC. Not enough to kill me, but enough to see it's potential and decide whether or not to pour more into it. 

No problem! I completely understand haha. :) Still: good job on that strategy! 

That is an incredible strategy! I would have never thought about a technique like that all. Congrats to you for coming up with it. How are you able to buy a property without satisfying all of the debts on it? I'm very curious haha.

Of course, if the individual entity/person isn't being ethical, then sure, but that doesn't answer the question about generalizing middlemen when middlemen are a core part of many industries. Bank robbers are stealing assets and not adding any value to the market. I'd hardly equate bank robbers and any middlemen. 

Sure if you prefer not to work with wholesalers, then you don't have to. However, the competition will always be there. That's the nature of a free market. 

I completely agree. 

And to expand on the Class D note: The east coast is full of class D properties that are simply left to be a blight on the neighborhood simply because no broker, or agent, would touch it. And frankly, rehabbers and landlords are not in the business of cold calling, skip tracing, and marketing leads. They are in the business of rehabbing and landlording. They aren't going to put in the work to contract the property when that labor (and cost) could be better spent elsewhere on class B and C properties that are easy to buy (but more expensive). As someone who grew up watching my class D neighborhood wither away, I would love to have someone (professional) scoop up those properties and hand them off to someone would have fixed them up sooner had they known about them. The brokers, agents/realtors won't do it, so who will?

Thank you so much for the feedback! :) CMU is a wonderful school. I remember going to educational programs there as a kid haha. Pittsburgh has great investment potential, just a different kind than what people typically think when they look at urban areas. I'm fortunate enough to be native to a size-able market with multiple kinds of investment possibilities with a such a low cost to entry. It's definitely some good luck! I think Pittsburgh will live as it always has, so I don't want to scare away any investors. It just takes a different mindset, that's all. 

Aside from my personal experience, I also think about how Pittsburgh was affected by every other modern economic change (the dot.com bubble, rise of Silicon Valley/FAANG, etc.). The bulk of the money has always gone to Philadelphia or New York. The city gets the ripples 5-10 years after them, but it's nothing to turn the culture here. At its heart, Pittsburgh is a beer and pizza city that loves football and hockey. 

There can be many reasons why a homeowner may not want to go through the leaps and bounds that come with hiring an agent. We know this from the existence of off-market transactions. 

As far as "the usual WS approach", I would say that as the practice becomes more mainstream, more industry standards come into play, and the better, bigger, and more professional wholesalers take the share of the demand. Why? For the exact reasons that you frown upon wholesaling/wholesalers. However, are we really to judge an entire practice simply because of a few bad apples? We are all capitalists, no? There have been unethical capitalists. Does that mean all capitalists are unethical? Or that the general procedures most legitimate capitalists practice are unethical? I would argue not. Plus, wholesalers are not the only professionals capable of being unethical in real estate. There's bad landlords, investors, flippers, agents, brokers, and Realtors. In fact, there was just news that the NAR just banned pocket listings. So clearly there's individuals with the professional bells and whistles not playing fair either, but I wouldn't go so far as to generalize all Realtors.

Also, marketing is simply apart of business. There are standards, yes, but it's not going away. It's no different than cold callers in any other industry. There are middlemen in every transaction. Dyson doesn't fault Target for flipping their vacuum cleaners because they appreciate the value of not having to operate stores, acquire customers, serve customers, process retail orders, and ship products. Customers don't fault Target for adding a premium on Dyson vacuum cleaners because they appreciate the value of not having to go to a Dyson store, talk to a Dyson salesperson, wait for a Dyson vacuum cleaner to be manufactured for them, and then organize shipping with Dyson. As long as there is value to add, there will be middlemen ready to provide that value. If there wasn't value, the middlemen wouldn't be in business. 

I'm new as well, but here's how I thought it. 

What am I getting out of wholesaling? What's my exit strategy?

If you're planning to go big and take real estate investing as a career I would suggest 

1. To get your license - removes a lot of the legal hoops and honestly lawmakers are whispering about regulating wholesaling. So it's better to just get the real deal.
2. Investing time is studying the systems of bigger wholesalers in your area. Offer to do some work form the "We Buy Houses" folks and see what they do.
3. Consume free online content from gurus, but never indulge in their courses. You aren't in the business of buying courses. If you're going to spend money on real estate education, get it from a licensed educator for the actual license. Guru products should be limited to whatever's at Barnes & Noble. :) 
4. Have a solid exit strategy. A lot of big wholesalers don't do only wholesale. They fix and flip, finance smaller investors, sell courses, sell software, invest in stocks and a lot more.

My personal favorite finance bros and wholesale gurus are Jerry Norton, Brett Daniels, Lili Invests, WhiteBoard Finance, TommyBryson, Max Maxwell, and Hot Wholesale.